The exhibition spread over two floors. The lower floor hosted pictures from the “5K Confinement” series (2016), which was first conceived for the artist’s “Belligerent Eyes” project that dealt with contemporary image production and was exhibited last year at Fondazione Prada’s Venice outpost Cà Corner della Regina. In this series, high-resolution close-ups of limbs, heads and faces were superimposed on a background of blown-up details of fabrics and, perhaps, filming equipment components. Drab and difficult to read, these pictures, as clarified in the catalog, were shot in an experimental cinema school, where a group of young people under the surveillance of closed-circuit cameras tested the machinery’s ability to oversee extended areas through a great number of movements. The sense of malaise and claustrophobia that the series elicited was less an effect of what was shown than of Fujiwara’s puzzle of fragmented, blown-up details that conjured up the invasive, skewed voyeurism of surveillance apparatus.

Much the same mood pervaded the second floor of the Osservatorio, which brought together works from different series dating from 2015 to the present, mixed together in large assemblages. For instance, merged pictures from three series, “Police Brutality” (2015), “#R” (2015– ) and “The Friday: A Report on a Report” (2015), resulted in a loaded collage of details of police uniforms, horses’ fur, badges and helmets surrounding a large picture of a cameramen in the process of filming. By associating title and images, one was inevitably reminded of violent clashes involving police forces. The pictures, in fact, were taken at different times and in different countries during standard police operations, when there were no clashes or riots. What Fujiwara seems to suggest is that digital manipulation—which he believes is used in photo reportage as an instrument of propaganda—can be instead turned into an instrument of critique: “Given how digital editing technology allows for the possibility to obscure the truth, is there a potential to do the reverse and use fake images to tell hidden truths?”

Questioning the ways in which mass media reports are produced and consumed, Fujiwara’s work is layered with a personal vision, and approaching its complexity with background knowledge of his research-based inquiry is therefore rewarding. Part of the intrigue of looking at his assemblages resides in embracing their absence of narrative and context, and in extracting from the visual clues that make up his puzzles a meaning that is ultimately left open to each viewer’s subjective interpretation.

Satoshi Fujiwara’s “EU” is on view at Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan, until October 16, 2017.

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